call centres

The union Usdaw said hundreds of workers at the site in Aintree were set to strike from 0500 BST on Sunday. It said staff were unhappy after being offered what it said was a below-inflation pay rise of 3%.

The text looks at the composition of foreign workers in Indian call centres and documents interviews with workers from international companies such as HP or Citibank which relocated call centre work to the industrial outskirts of Delhi.

Introduction

At the beginning everything looks really nice when you enter Fiat's call centre in Milan. Lots of space, multi-coloured cubicle walls and little flags, lots of young people sitting in front of large monitors, wandering around or relaxing and smoking in the corner by the vending machines. They speak all kinds of languages: Italian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Polish...

Teleprime is a call centre company which sells mobile phones and, more importantly, issues credit cards. It has many branches all over Athens (at least).

The news that fresh forced redundancies at Norwich Union by Aviva can only have come with shocked resignation to many people in Norwich this morning, as they gained the knowledge via the media that the present culture of ‘offshoring’ jobs to India continues to wreak havoc on Norwich’s work force and call centre staff across the country.

An agreement over pay and conditions was made in 2003, due to come into force in April 2006, several other East London hospitals agreed to the deal, only Rentokil at Whipps Cross has failed to honour it. The pay award is roughly equivalent to a £2 per hour raise, for staff who in some cases earn as little as £5.52 per hour, the agreement also included increases in leave entitlement.

Citing a £15m deficit, health bosses intend to shut centres at Doncaster, Scunthorpe, York, Chester, Bolton, Preston, Chorley, Southport, Cambridge, Croydon, Brighton and Kensington over the next 18 months.

Around 5,000 jobs are expected to go from the combined company's workforce of 17,000 over the next few years.

Last week, GMB member Irene Everett won the first ever unfair dismissal case for a sex worker, against Essex-based Datapro Service Limited. She had worked on their live adult chat lines for eight years. The GMB, following its merger with the International Union of Sex Workers in 2002, has been trying to organise in the UK, and this was their first victory.

The Public and Commercial Services Union says a leaked document from the Department of Work and Pensions shows that Secretary of State John Hutton is considering the outsourcing plan, which would hit staff in call centres in job centres and benefit agencies.

From undercurrent #8

Call centres are appearing everywhere. Representing a new way of integrating telecommunications and computer technology into the process of reshaping the division of labour, they are predominantly situated in the circulation process of capital - although some are within the production process itself. Bosses and politicians herald them as an example of the future of labour. Britain, whose national economy revolves around the finance sector, has 40% of the total call centres in Europe and this number is increasing every year. It is estimated that there are 350,000 workers employed in 4000 call centres, expected to rise to 500,000 in the next three years.(1)

from Riff-Raff #6

Kolinko
Hotlines: Call Centre - Inquiry - Communism
Published in Germany, October 2002